The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D.: A Novel Paperback – March 12, 2013

I am a 76 year old man and only child. I recently lost my wife , the love of my life, of 50 years. We were best friends since she was 13. 57 years of friendship, 54 as lovers. She died of a terminal cancer. We thought she beat it for the first 6 months, but then we found out she didn’t. It took her 2-1/2 years to die.She pretended everything was OK as we went to Chemo sessions and conducted our normal lives. Our kids are grown but our grandkids (twin boys) were only 7 when she was diagnosed. She loved them with all her heart and made time to spend with them every week.We traveled extensively our whole lives together. When the boys were young, they came with us. When they got older they came too, except with friends, girl friends or all together.She pretended all was well, until the last 11 days in the hospital, where we lived while waiting for her to leave us. We had many intense conversation in that 11 days. Conversations we didn’t have in the previous 2-1/2 years while she was pretending nothing was wrong. She acted as my companies CFO until 2 days before she had to be hospitalized.She died in my arms as I promised. I had to tell her it was OK to leave as I gave her our last kiss. It was a fitting end to a 57 year old love affair.We also lived through 911 and worried about our kids but not obsessively so. We were careful of big cities but were not crazy about it (she might have been, but hid it from me).Our ending was both sad but complete. I love her still. This book’s ending was lacking that completeness that I require.Kate should have sit down beside Chris and curled up next to him and told him she loved him and said; “911 has unhinged me, add Elizabeth’s sudden death and I became too introspective. Forgive me for being disconnected. I love you more now than I ever have. I appreciate that I have you”.He would take her in is arms and tell her he started smoking again, for the same reasons she became obsessed with their safety. The final scene should have been them walking toward the house arms around each other.There was too much left unsaid at the end. It struck too close to home for me. At the end of a love affair there are too many things left unsaid even after a lifetime of loving each other. My wife was a very uncomplicated person on the surface. Very complicated and insightful at her core. I am sure she never knew how much I appreciated her, even though I tried all my life to show her in so many ways.This book effected me at a very deep level because of all the thing left unsaid over a 57 year relationship. I would like to think we supported each other as best we could no matter the circumstances. I believe the main characters in the book would have acted the same way.Great story!

The author is a friend of mine, but even if she weren't, I would still be very impressed with this accomplished first novel. The narrator, Kate, is bequeathed a trunk full of diaries written by her friend, Elizabeth. Elizabeth had died in a plane crash as she was heading to a location in the west for reasons that aren't at first clear. As Kate reads the journals, she comes to know Elizabeth better, but she also comes to realize how little she knew her when she was alive. As she pieces together Elizabeth's past and comes to know her innermost thoughts, she wonders what she will do with this knowledge and the journals that holds them. Should she return them to Elizabeth's husband, though what is in them may cause him pain? Should she keep private those things Elizabeth herself chose to keep private? And why was she going out west anyway? These are the questions that move the plot forward.The plot is of secondary importance, though. Bernier shows how a relationship is a recipe made up of what each person wants to share about themselves sifted with how each person interprets what the other says and does. As Kate reads Elizabeth's journals, she is forced to revise her interpretations about Elizabeth, but this revision extends to others in her life. As she recognizes how little she knew Elizabeth, she has similar realizations about others in her life: friends, co-workers, and even her husband. As the book progresses, I love how Bernier gives us substantial portions of Elizabeth's journals without Kate's narrative interpretation. As readers, we get to know Elizabeth better, but we also get to revise our understanding of Kate as we imagine how she must feel as she reads these same words.Bernier has been a journalist her whole career, but her writing here is both more lush and more incisive than that of most journalist-turned-novelists. She creates beautiful similes which refract and reflect the events she is writing about. Her writing is at turns funny, then wise, then wistful. I look forward to reading her next novel, and many more after that.

I had difficulty caring for Kate and Elizabeth. I thought them both selfish in their own way and their marriages were shallow. Imagine not telling your husband you are ill. He would be the first person I would tell. It is understandable why Kate's husband grew impatient with her obsession of reading the diaries. She spent her entire vacation at the beach reading and barely enjoying her children or the setting. As for the friendship? What friendship.? Here, after I die, read the diares and tell everyone what I did not have the nerve to do. Great friend????? I found this tedious and a bit wordy. Could not wait for it to end.

Took me a little while to get into, but I'm fairly certain that was my fault not the author's! Otherwise I enjoyed it. A story that causes one to examine one's own life without being either maudlin or saccharine - definitely worth the read!(Only four stars, as I reserve five for books that I will read again!!!)

This is an extremely well written novel. It compelled my interest with an intensity reflective of Kate's need to complete the task left her by her friend Elizabeth. It is a story reflective of the challenging times in which we live and the struggle women face finding their way through the complexities of daily life.

When Elizabeth dies unexpectedly in a freak plane crash, her friend Kate is surprised to find that she has been left all Elizabeth's journals, from childhood on. Kate begins to read them on the family's summer vacation to their attractive beach cottage, and soon finds herself hooked. Far from being the calm, in control and ultra-domestic mother than Kate always assumed she was, Elizabeth was a deeply frustrated woman, with many secret heartaches. Her younger sister was killed in a traffic accident when she was a teenager, her parents split up soon after, her mother's final illness (cancer) interrupted Elizabeth's time living abroad in Florence and training to be an artist. In her twenties Elizabeth suffered social anxiety and struggled to find a long-term partner. Even when she moved to New York and met handsome golfer Dave Martin (who became her husband) her troubles weren't entirely over: Dave assumed that Elizabeth would always put house and family first, while she wanted to pursue work as a graphic designer, and he had trouble expressing his emotions, and various fear including one of death, that alarmed Elizabeth. And once Elizabeth had had her first two children and was entrenched in mother-and-baby group (where she met Kate) she suffered from the feeling that her career as an artist and graphic designer would disappear completely as motherhood took over. Elizabeth's mixed longings, fears and frustrations chime powerfully with Kate's sense that she's given up quite a bit in her life to be the mother of small James and Piper (poor girl, not a nice name). Does she miss her career as a pastry cook, and would she want to go back to it? And how would an insistence on having more of a career affect Kate's relationship with her globally-travelling husband, Chris, who's already worried about her obsession with the diaries?Bernier's picked a very interesting and relevant subject here: how far women can truly have it all ways, and manage to have a career as well as children. She's also a rather stylish writer in terms of prose style - the descriptions of different places in the book are gorgeous, reminiscent of the early Anita Shreve - and there are passages where one senses a formidable writer-in-embryo (in particular some of the later scenes involving Dave, a really interesting character). However, I felt that Bernier never tackled in depth the frustration that women may feel in giving up their own work to be full-time mothers, and how they might try to keep both options open. Kate and Elizabeth both seemed to have given up the idea of trying to have a career as well as have children very quickly - even Kate's dithering about whether or not to take another restaurant job was never that serious. Elizabeth's vocation as an artist was never explored in detail - we never had an idea what sort of style her paintings were in, which artists she really admired, how she'd hoped to relaunch her career, whether her ambition was always to be a painter. And the women's ultra-comfortable lives - seven-week vacations in idyllic summer cottages, big houses, coffee mornings, no financial hardship at all - made it sometimes hard to take their angst that seriously: if they really did feel they were losing independence, couldn't they have spoken to their wealthy husbands about getting a part-time au pair or nanny, or looked into working from home? Occasionally too the novel took a rather juddering step away from its measured tone into more sensationalist themes that then were abandoned or jarred with the rest of the story: Kate's 'prepping' for some massive disaster by hiding food in her garage; Dave's threatening Kate when she loses the key to Elizabeth's trunk of journals. And Elizabeth's final 'big secret' was a let-down, even if it did allow you to see that Dave had matured - a move into Jodi Picoult tearjerker territory at its weakest.I ended the book feeling that there was a good book in there, but that Bernier had got rather too seduced by her characters' luxurious lifestyle, and avoided directly confronting the frustration felt by many mothers who feel they need to balance their own work with their childcare. In the end, nothing was explored or resolved in the depth that it could be. Still, there's something about the quality of the writing, some of the characterization and a few of the themes tackled that makes me think that Bernier could develop into a very interesting writer - and I'd definitely read another book by her.

This is one of those books that has you thinking about life and relationships, and how little we sometimes know of each other. I found myself wishing for someone to discuss the book with. ...Which would make it a good selection for any book club!

I didn’t want to put it down and when I had to, the story followed me around. I highlighted quite a few passages that I want to revisit and think on some more.